The 12 most incredible webcomics

We pick our favorite digital funnies.

Many of us have memories of reading the Sunday morning cartoons in the newspaper, but few of us still get a daily rag on the doorstep anymore. That doesn't mean we've stopped enjoying a few strips of well-timed puns or goofy antics, though; webcomics are our new addiction. And on the Internet, every day can be Sunday cartoons day. Here are a dozen of our absolute favorites.

Goats/Scenes from a Multiverse

I first encountered Jon Rosenberg at Small Press Expo a few years ago while tagging along with my wife the librarian, picking up a copy of Infinite Typewriters, a compilation of the Goats webcomic. Rosenberg started Goats in 1997 as a pseudo-autobiographical cartoon strip about Jon and Philip, two guys who were somehow vaguely in the tech business. And then it was blasted with cosmic radiation and became something much...stranger, incorporating science, quantum theory, and metaphysics in a way that was constantly hilarious, with a cast that includes demonic chickens, cybernetic goldfish, and an overclocked lemon. When I read the plot thread where Phillip and Jon hijack an alien spacecraft, fly to the center of the galaxy, meet God in the guise of a pirate, convince him to prove himself by changing form into a pork chop, and then eat him, I was hooked. And then Rosenberg took a break from Goats in 2010, leaving the story midstream.

Fortunately, he didn't abandon the world he created—instead, he shifted his focus to Scenes from a Multiverse—a daily webcomic based in the same collection of alternate realities that draws on pop and geek culture, science fiction, and just about everything else for the absurd. Until recently, Rosenberg allowed readers to vote on which plotlines to continue in the next strip; he has since abandoned that for a benevolent dictatorship approach (which hasn't upset many of his fans). He finds a way to reframe current events (like Superstorm Sandy) and make philisophical and politically-laced statements that make me laugh and think at the same time. It's a guilty pleasure that isn't so guilty after all. ~Sean Gallagher

Gunnerkrigg Court

When I went to New York ComicCon with my 10-year old daughter in 2010, she had just finished reading the Scott Pilgrim series (she went dressed as Ramona Flowers). Little did I know at the time that she would suck me down a very different rabbit hole, when we met Tom Siddell, an English webcomic author and artist. Imagine if Neal Gaiman and William Gibson had co-written Harry Potter, and you've got Gunnerkrigg Court, the story of a boarding school that sits quite literally at the boundaries of myth and science.

Siddell illustrates the complex story beautifully with techniques that draw on the stylistic approach of anime, but with rich and detailed scenery. And there's nothing juvenile about the plotline, which revolves around the mysterious origins of the school and the inhabitants of the Gillitie wood across the bridge—many of whom are drawn from Celtic and Native American mythology. Published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Gunnerkrigg has become something I'd never have expected—a father-daughter readalong that both of us have been sucked into. The first thing my daughter often asks when she gets home from school is, "Have you read the new Gunnerkrigg?" ~Sean + Zoe Gallagher

Dinosaur Comics

Limitations are often said to boost creativity, and there's no premise more limited than that of Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics. Nearly every one of the 2,300+ (and counting) comics uses the exact same pictures—six panels of hokey dinosaur clip art—and just changes the words. T-Rex, Utahraptor, and Dromiceiomimus have discussed everything from dating to literary techniques to erotic fiction to board games to the heat death of the universe. Despite the comic's limited art, North has developed an extensive roster of unseen secondary characters including God (who, it turns out, is usually just trolling everyone), the Devil (who just wants to talk about old school video games), and William Shakespeare (forsooth!).

Hark! A Vagrant

Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant has bestowed the Internet with many a gift: “aww yiss.” “I had fun once, and it was awful.” “Ooh, Mister X.” The comic was born from Beaton’s contributions to her university newspaper and her ever-increasing expertise in historical events of varying levels of obscurity. Hark! manages to make retellings of historical and literary events indelibly hilarious, often by basing their characters off modern stereotypes. Young Ada Lovelace is the hapless victim of a helicopter parent, Cinderella as a gorilla juicehead, Jefferson as the straight-edge foil to the silly and childish Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin as the straight-edge foil to the class clown John Adams.

In the context of the Internet, Beaton's art style is old school: pencil drawings among a webcomic sea of vector art, which gives it a lot of charm. Her hand-drawn thousand-yard stare on almost any character gives me a bout of the giggles. But Beaton’s work is unparalleled for the strength of her voice and good comedic timing, which set Hark! A cut above the rest. ~Casey Johnston

Pokey the Penguin

Pokey the Penguin has always been "the original online cartoon" to me. Although its creator is a mystery (well, Wikipedia attributes Web Developer Steve Havelka of Portland, Oregon. But Pokey never had a byline), and the series has been long discontinued, the vast library of archived works is a treasure trove of absurdist situations and nonsensical punchlines. It is the anti-comic, created back in the days when the Internet embodied the opposite of all the wholesome, capitalist, social things you were supposed to engage in.

Pokey and friends—the "Little Girl" (also a penguin), Mr. Nutty (a snowman), Chicken Delicious (a penguin), among others—hang out in the Arctic Circle and have zany adventures, narrated through a jarring hodgepodge of all-caps and strike-throughs. Sometimes the illustrator has an unexplained conniption fit and scribbles all over the cell. Often, punctuation is gratuitous. Mostly, Pokey's comedic anarchy make it a perfect fill-in-the-gap cartoon that can apply to any situation. So memorize some of the bizarre lines and, as they say in Ancient Scotland, Bon Voyage! ~Megan Geuss

Penny Arcade

I have been given an impossible task: write why I like Penny Arcade and then supply a single example comic. Just one? I only get one? How can I summarize fourteen years of irreverent and hilariously insightful gaming cultural satire and commentary? Shall I discuss their breakdown of the effect of anonymity on civility, or recap the Cold War table tennis epic Paint the Line? Perhaps I should recount their treatises on heroism, multiculturalism, eschatology, dadaism, or the pitfalls of Wikipedia and fallacious arguments from authority?

No, honestly, out of the entire Penny Arcade oeuvre, the one strip that still makes me laugh the hardest is the one about the claw shrimp. ~Lee Hutchinson

I was going to go into a big diatribe about how bad Penny Arcade is and why in god's name is it on this list. Instead, I'll simply challenge anyone who agrees with its inclusion to show me one PA comic from the past 3 years (I'm being generous) that has been funny, or astute, or would in any way justify it being on the top 12 most "INCREDIBLE" webcomics.

Buttersafe is excellent. If I'd done more than one entry I'd have also mentioned Nedroid, which updates only sporadically but is usually hilarious, and Married to the Sea, which I usually skip for a couple months and then go and binge on. Three Word Phrase is also capable of being funny, but it's also capable of being Just So Weird.

I'm going to toss in a recommendation for Cucumber Quest, which I've just found utterly charming. (http://cucumber.gigidigi.com/) It's just a fun little cute comic with a quirky sense of humor. I've found it benefits greatly by going back and reading it more like a comic book than one page at a time. (You may remember the author from the MGS comics she did back in the day and published on LJ)

http://drmcninja.com -- Christopher Hastings makes the craziest comic I've ever read, and just makes it so damned enjoyable and cool. He also wrote the Deadpool side-story for Marvel's Fear Itself run.

I was going to go into a big diatribe about how bad Penny Arcade is and why in god's name is it on this list. Instead, I'll simply challenge anyone who agrees with its inclusion to show me one PA comic from the past 3 years (I'm being generous) that has been funny, or astute, or would in any way justify it being on the top 12 most "INCREDIBLE" webcomics.

I was going to go into a big diatribe about how bad Penny Arcade is and why in god's name is it on this list. Instead, I'll simply challenge anyone who agrees with its inclusion to show me one PA comic from the past 3 years (I'm being generous) that has been funny, or astute, or would in any way justify it being on the top 12 most "INCREDIBLE" webcomics.

Though it's been on hiatus for a while, The Perry Bible Fellowship(occasionally NSFW) probably deserves to be mentioned in this context. Though it started in print, it gained much fame as a web comic. Not the best choice for those who are easily offended, but it was consistently clever and very well drawn.

I was going to go into a big diatribe about how bad Penny Arcade is and why in god's name is it on this list. Instead, I'll simply challenge anyone who agrees with its inclusion to show me one PA comic from the past 3 years (I'm being generous) that has been funny, or astute, or would in any way justify it being on the top 12 most "INCREDIBLE" webcomics.

Why would anyone bother? You've obviously already decided.

I could post dozens that made me laugh, sometimes even uproariously, from the past three years. Somehow, I suspect that you'd just say they're not funny.

Spinnerette - a comic about a young lady with a comic fixation who ends up gaining another four arms and the abilities to shoot webs and climb walls, like a certain well-known Marvel character. It's an extremely self-aware comic, which pokes fun at itself/the comics industry at times. One minor plot element involves her having to change from her original costume (which was made by stitching six Venom halloween costumes together) because Marvel slapped her with a cease-and-desist.

Girl Genius - A comic by Phil Foglio that originally started as a standard "dead-tree" comic, and changed into a webcomic when they had some difficulties with publishing the monthly title. Being freed from the constraints of the standard page layout has resulted in some truly fabulous strips (even though most pages still adhere to that format).

Oglaf - An EXTREMELY NSFW comic that deals in sexual absurdities in a fantasy world. Enter at your own risk, if there's anyone who could read it over your shoulder.

I used to read Sluggy Freelance, Exploitation Now, VG Cats, and a handful of other webcomics, but many of the ones I previously read have "jumped the shark," and are nowhere near as clever as they used to be (or simply don't exist any more).

I literally read about a thousand pages of it after reading such glowing recommendations.

I really didn't get it. It seemed like I was supposed to be watching someone else playing the Sims or something like that. After probably 20 pages in I could tell it was grossly overrated and seemed more like a massive 4chan style in joke (hurr hurr, there goes another moron reading that terrible webcomic) than something anyone could genuinely like.

http://drmcninja.com -- Christopher Hastings makes the craziest comic I've ever read, and just makes it so damned enjoyable and cool. He also wrote the Deadpool side-story for Marvel's Fear Itself run.

+1 for QC!!! Have been reading that near every damn day for a few years now. When I first started, he was a few years in, so I sat and read from start to finish. Its very cool how you can see how his artwork abilities have improved for the years. He's a good Twitter source of funny as well.

Well, shit. I commented on several webcomics, and forgot the one that I intended to post about in the first place.

JL8 (formerly known as Little League) is a comic strip that looks at the major members of the Justice League... as 8-year-olds. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Power Girl, Green Lantern, and The Flash are the major characters, but there are a fair number of cameos, with Lex Luthor and the rest of the Injustice League putting in an appearance... and the reveal of who their PE teacher is should be good for a laugh. =^_^=

Any list without Dr McNinja and The Non-Adventures of Wonderella is incomplete.

I used to read several of the ones here, and they are good, but also have reached a point where they seem formulaic. Which is inevitable as characters are defined over time. Wonderella certainly is, but still manages to toss a twist at me. And I never know what is coming in Dr McNinja.

I think Schlock Mercenary should be on any list. It is probably by far the most professional webcomic out there with an artist who supports a family now and does what it takes to have a daily comic for more than a decade straight without interruption. He didn't start with any talent just a plan to do it right and has stuck with it while the art improved.

Questionable Content is once of the best of the current crop. With punchlines, characterization and all the trappings.

Girl Genius is good. It does have the same problem as many full page webcomics: very slow pacing. It does not, however, have the other: artist burnout long before the arrives.

Someone should make a list of the best completed comics. Stuff like A Miracle of Science, Narbonic, Get Medievel, Angel Moxie.

I want to cheer for Dinosaur Comics here. I've been following it since 2007 and went back through his archives, and Ryan North has been writing consistently funny, insightful stuff for 10 years now.

In addition, his was the first comic that I saw make use of the alt text as an extra throwaway gag, which was like a friggin christmas present when I first found out about it; I am also under the impression that pressure from his readers helped get a Firefox issue fixed (alt text wouldn't display more than X characters).

I worked tech support help desk for 3 years and it beat me down, but his comic seriously helped me get through some of that roughness. Good stuff.

Edit to add "Concerned" is worth a shot. It's been completed for some time now, but should appeal to anyone who liked HL2.

I literally read about a thousand pages of it after reading such glowing recommendations.

I really didn't get it. It seemed like I was supposed to be watching someone else playing the Sims or something like that. After probably 20 pages in I could tell it was grossly overrated and seemed more like a massive 4chan style in joke (hurr hurr, there goes another moron reading that terrible webcomic) than something anyone could genuinely like.

What's the fascination?

If you actually did read that much it probably wasn't for you, it has a specific self-aware style of humour you need to get. That said I advise anyone else trying, to read Problem Sleuth first as I have linked and to at least try out the Flashes because it takes a while to get up to the full scope.

I like it because of the very consistent rules and deep world it uses. Almost every page or line is a callback to previous pages. It's refreshing compared to all the fantasy series that never go anywhere, have deus ex machina and disappointing endings.

And even if I didn't read it the soundtrack is melodic, videogame-like and upbeat so I'd like that regardless.

The only comic mentioned in the article that I read on a regular basis is The Oatmeal but he doesn't keep a regular schedule (not that I'm complaining, the quality over quantity approach is definitely sensible for this medium).

What I really like about web comics is the fact that the internet allows authors to communicate with their fan base quite freely and easily. The back and forth between them and us is way more gratifying and instantaneous than the 'old ways' like fan mail .

In fact, all three comics that I mentioned more or less double as blogs. I think it humanizes the genre because now we can have an insight into the process that went behind the creation of those funny panels.

How about Sam and Fuzzy? Interesting characters, deeply developed plots and a rock-solid M-W-F update schedule. And it has been running since '02, so there's plenty to read.

If you prefer absurdist black humor: Red Meat. It's done in a simple, negative-space style and updates every Tuesday. Another long-running webcomic.

There's the incredibly well-drawn The Abominable Christopher Charles. As with the first two comics, it's done in a black-gray-white palette, but the drawings are incredibly detailed and life-like. Quite well-written, and updated every Wednesday.

And, for the sci-fi set, Outsider. A combination of CG and hand-drawn, it is a very well-put together comic. Very deeply thought out universe, and the story so far is well-written. It's major downside is its update schedule: it pretty much doesn't have one. It can be months between new pages. Enjoyable, but frustrating.

I was going to go into a big diatribe about how bad Penny Arcade is and why in god's name is it on this list. Instead, I'll simply challenge anyone who agrees with its inclusion to show me one PA comic from the past 3 years (I'm being generous) that has been funny, or astute, or would in any way justify it being on the top 12 most "INCREDIBLE" webcomics.